


Thoughts on Living with the Lost

by homsantoft (tofsla)



Category: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: M/M, Missing Scene, Ryder family secrets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-04
Updated: 2017-07-04
Packaged: 2018-11-22 19:45:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11387094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tofsla/pseuds/homsantoft
Summary: Consider the revelation of the reapers; imagine that level of destruction.Consider how to live with the implications.Jaal and Scott work through it.





	Thoughts on Living with the Lost

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt ficlet - brendanthesalty wanted a look at the emotional fallout for Scott on learning about the Reapers & Jaal comforting him. Here we go.

Here is a place six hundred years gone:

Scott, kicking his heels on a beach. Was his sister with him? Perhaps his sister was with him. Yes, give him his sister—that looks good, that piece of family. Let them laugh. The sky is very blue, and the water is very blue, and the sand—golden or white, wasn't it? Liam showed him some images—some little clips—a disorientingly vast and hazy horizon. The swell of waves. Hiss, hiss, hiss across the fine-grained shore.

It is another clip like this that Scott watches now—is this progress from listening to those discovered recordings, the static and the panicked voice, or is it worse? How frustratingly hard it is to understand how humans consider these things.

The clip ends, jolts back to its beginning. Scott shifts in his chair: weight forward, elbow on his desk, chin on his hand. Back again, legs stretching out, the chair tipping. He rubs at his jaw, usually kept very smooth—it was rough when Jaal touched it last. Only a little, but the feeling was strange.

A white creature, a bird, wheels across the screen. The same arc as the last time, as the time before that. The same cry. It is of some specific type, a specific genus, a catalogued place in an order of being—in a dream of a world.

"You're studying it," Jaal says.

"Like a battlefield." The film is flicked away, folds abruptly in on itself. Scott stares at the bare space on the wall. "It probably was one."

He speaks very flatly.

We knew, he has said. We knew we could never go back.

He said it again and again.

"Shit," he says now.

A dampness to the sound.

It aches. _Jaal_ aches. Everything he has touched in his life, really, has been a part of a battle. Even Aya is shaped by a battle, even if it was one which disguised itself as a natural disaster. How often he has considered the past. Imagine sleeping through the end of the world—imagine waking—no oceans on Voeld, no great green spaces. Imagine knowing, in precise detail, what had been lost.

But Scott doesn't even get to know what might remain. Does anything remain? Perhaps these arks, flung through dark space, represent the final debris of a whole group of species.

"Oh, my darling one," Jaal says. Turns Scott's chair to see that beloved face, to cup it in his hand. Scott's eyes are closed, his mouth tense with unhappiness. But his head turns to Jaal's touch, and he sighs when Jaal's hand slides back and settles in his hair, at the base of his delicate skull. "Tell me about it."

Yes. Here, let us lie together on a bed—let the long wall of the cabin which faces outward into space become clear, scatter the stars around us.

He showed Scott his childhood dream of a universe spreading itself in his bedroom once—came back to the ship, later, to this. A galaxy opening outside. A galaxy opening within him. A thoughtful moment then, their relationship still uncertain. Other moments, later. Scott has noticed, of course, that Jaal enjoys it—sex on this bed, in this room, on the edge of a beautiful void. Has laughed about it, but breathlessly, the sound stuttering into cries as Jaal touches him.

They only lie here now. Jaal has been counting the ways in which Scott breathes, rapid panting against the inside of Jaal's thigh or the even slowness of sleep, the easy rise and fall of routine, of no particular state of mind. The shallow quickness of anxiety. Now he breathes slowly and pauses between inhale and exhale, as though he might forget how.

"I guess we're all shaped by stuff that's too big to see," Scott says. "Pretty messed up."

Template bodies in a vast genetic library.

Watchers in the dark.

"Not in the same way, I think." Jaal coaxes Scott closer against his side. "We were given choice. We exist, as we are, and we may make of it what we please. This—this supposed cycle—is a monstrous denial."

The kett rest unnamed in the pause before Scott speaks.

"Maybe they were stopped. Who knows." 

He doesn't believe it, does he? He doesn't sound as though—no, he doesn't. 

Jaal has heard the recordings, over and over as Scott's focus turned to that lost place. He knows desperation he hears it, has met it so very many times. The Asari who sent that message directly to Scott's father, she was desperate—but was it the kind of desperate that drives one to survival, or to destruction?

They cannot know. Jaal would prefer to hope. Scott has taught him to hope.

"Saved by some power they could barely have imagined before, hm? By something able to change the rules of a galaxy?"

Scott snorts.

"I don't know," Jaal says. "I think that should sound at least a little familiar. The Milky Way is built on ancient mysteries of its own. Perhaps not all of them are bad."

"Trying to make me feel better."

Jaal laughs, turns his head, lips to Scott's hair. Shifts until he can kiss Scott's unhappy mouth, not with passion but with an impulse to offer a small confirmation. Comfort. "Yes. That's what we do for our loved ones. That doesn't mean that it's untrue."

"Ah. You'd never lie to me."

"Except about the cultural significance of songs."

"Fine. Except about that."

"And about the gloves."

"Really?"

"And not getting the joke. Sometimes."

" _That_ I'd noticed."

In quiet silence, they breathe among the stars. Other things breathe there too, perhaps—or exist in a quiet whir of mechanical life—watch and shape and permit and take. 

Jaal finds he is peculiarly unafraid. He is sad—yes, that's true—but it is only the bitter sadness of the Angara, of living among the lost and losing a little more each year. He would not wish the brutality of this loss on any other galaxy. But it is so inconceivably distant. Impossible to think of Scott as a relic like an ancient Angaran instrument, plucked up out of ruin. In many other worlds he would be dead. In any other world. Six hundred years should separate them. And still: 

He is so very alive.

"Your people are not lost," Jaal says. "Mine aren't, are we? You tell us so enough."

"Oh, sure, turn it around on me." Scott's breath is a stuttering gust. Tears—no—laughter. "Asshole."

Pause.

Breathe.

"Wonder if knowing what the hell actually happened would help or make it worse."

"Scott," Jaal says.

"I'm worried about this shady benefactor," Scott says, ignoring the gentle pressure Jaal had tried to exert—or just missing it. "They knew. Sent us out here. I keep wondering if somehow—"

He shakes his head.

"It was geth technology that sent us here," he says. "But I can't see how—"

SAM says: "I advise caution in allowing yourself to spend too much time speculating on this point. I am monitoring the variables, but there are a great many unknowns."

Always the third party. He—it—he analyses Jaal and Jaal analyses it. Him. They are both trying to take apart the universe. See how it works.

"Fuck off, SAM," Scott says. "Give me a moment, would you?"

But he is beginning to relax against Jaal's side.

"You're here," Jaal says. "We'll build something. No matter why."

"A better now, right?"

"Right."

Scott breathes in deeply. Holds the breath. One, two, three, four, five.

Exhales. A sigh.

"Right," he says. Scrubs at his face. Turns a small smile on Jaal, and lets Jaal melt into the warmth that seeing Scott smile always gives him. "Right."

There are so many things here that will probably never be okay. Not really.

But they'll be better.


End file.
